From Instancing to Worldy Games
Brad McQuaid has written a rather good article on instancing and the tradeoffs and choices inherent in it. In it, he divides up possible game types that use instancing into these types:
- A “pen and paper game, online” — essentially,a game that tries to recapture the charm and enjoyment of tabletop RPGing. The massiveness of such a project is the part to call into question.
- An “open big” game, which is apparently the way he thinks of WoW. In this model, you intentionally work with the business trend of the last few years, which is that games acquire the majority of their customers at launch, rather than going through a steady growth period that perhaps (because of network effects) develops into a “J-curve” of rising subscriptions. (Of current games, Eve, Second Life, and Runescape all show strong evidence of J-curve growth).
The difficulty with this sort of model has always been that if you fail to open big, you’re dead; this is the boat that boxed product is in now, of course. Big openings don’t stick, acquisition falls off, so you plan to recoup purely off the opening. In other words, retention becomes a less important factor — instead of being the thing that provides the most revenue, it becomes gravy. The game is designed to “end,” so to speak, and perhaps be resubbed to periodically when new content becomes available.
There’s attractions to this model, chief amongst them the avoidance of player fatigue. The downside, of course, is that opening big demands a huge investment.
- A hub-and-instances world, which he calls a hybrid of the pen-and-paper game and the MMO. This is, to my mind, what Guild Wars is, and it’s a popular meme these days. I tend to think of these as being very like Diablo, because the amount of gameplay in the “lobby” is limited. It’s like Quake if the server selection screen looked like a Quake map. They are, fundamentally, session-based games with a degree of persistence slapped on top.
To my mind, these games lie at the edge of what might be considered a virtual world in the first place. A lot depends on what degree of persistence is offered. HoloMUD, which I have cited before, was rather of this model in many ways, and the way in which I tended to regard it was to evaluate the lobby alone by my criteria of whether it was a virtual world.
Brad states that the folks who want to make this sort of game are
"…mostly people who got into online gaming very early, in the old pay by the hour days, working on commercial games (not MUDs) and what attracts them to online isn’t necessarily what attracts the conventional or modern MMOG player. There’s not necessarily a yearning for a vast, shared, persistent virtual world, a complex economy, or any other cool or esoteric Kosterian theory or mechanic. No, that’s not necessarily what they’re looking for; rather, they just want to play with some people, a smaller group, and to have fun, likely in a more linear or scripted manner… they want to play D&D or an old school single player RPG, but with their friends. And they want it to last. (And then there are those who claim to want it all, to have their cake and eat it too – not sure what to say to that crowd). And there’s nothing wrong with all of this, outside of, IMHO, three things:
1. They keep calling themselves, marketing themselves, as Massively Multiplayer Games, which I think is misleading to the consumer.
2. They have some very serious design hurdles to overcome in order to create the amount of varied and interesting and preferably not-repeatable content I think they’re looking for.
3. And lastly, and this is a small subset of them, but it seems like the more vocal proponents of this sort of online game often times actively resent traditional MMOGs and their players – ‘catasses’ is what they call us.. I’ve seen things said like ‘we were first to make money online’ and ‘MMOG developers are just MUD kids lucky enough to actually be paid’. I’ve also seen things posted and said about how it’s only masochistic people who play traditional MMOGs because of their tendency to grind at times, to incorporate ‘ground hog day’, and the fact that MMOG players are willing to put up with griefers of any sort, to any degree. I say we call a truce as soon as their marketing folk stop calling their games MMOGs – call ‘em whatever you want, but something not MMOG. Then this catass will be cool with you all."
My sense is that this isn’t entirely accurate; a lot of the folks that I have seen developing this sort of game are what I would call single-player game developers. Yes, the “old guard” of online game developers includes a hefty dose of people who worked on session-based games, but folks like Kelton Flinn, John Taylor, Jessica Mulligan, and others have also worked at length in persistent worlds as well. The person who most resembles Brad’s remark is probably Jonathan Baron aka Bluebaron (his handle on Kesmai), whom I know to have some distaste for the “cumulative character” model of online gaming.
But more typically, I see this sort of game coming from people weaned on single-player gaming. Richard Garriott has talked about making online games this way for years and years, for example. Guild Wars draws its heritage from Diablo, not MUD1. It’s made explicit int he marketing materials of D&D Online.
- An MMO that dabbles with instancing is the last type Brad cites — essentially, working within the mud tradition, but making use of instancing as a tool. Brad advocates doing this with fully in-context pocket worlds, such as a holodeck or an X-Men-style “Danger Room.” He also cynically points out that the more common reasons are because there wasn’t enough time or budget to develop sufficient content to keep spawn points from being contested or overcrowded.
My own take on instancing is that it’s merely a form of embedded game. It’s ideally suited to embed session-based activities within a virtual world. I see no mechanical difference between having people go into a Holodeck to do something, and having people go into a pocket zone “chess world” when they sit down at a chess board, or go into a 2d shoot-’em-up when they sit down at an arcade machine in a virtual pool hall.
The experiential difference, of course, is significant. Current instances are designed to feel seamless with the larger world experience. Achievements carry through, the interfaces are identical to the main game, and so on. But this is, to my mind, an underutilization of what instances can actually accomplish. It’s approaching instances as a way to rectify perceived shortcomings with shared virtual worlds, rather than approaching instances as a manifestation of the power of shared virtual worlds.
Similar interfaces, achievements carrying between embedded games and the “main world,” and so on, are all details. The real question is whether you are designing a virtual world, and embedding some small-scale games within it, or are designing small-scale games and putting a lobby outside them to connect them. The mindset is best expressed with a diagram. To know what sort of game you are making, you need to know whether you are drawing a bunch of boxes with a hub connecting them, or whether you are drawing one box and putting a lot of little boxes within it.
To my mind, virtual worlds with relatively few embedded games, such as the Diku-style games, are one big box with only a few smaller boxes within them. The largest of the embedded boxes is the combat-and-loot game. And the “worldy” games are just ones with a lot of embedded boxes in them.
There’s been a lot of talk about whether the day of the “worldy” games is over. The above is why I think it isn’t. The trend over time is still, even with World of Warcraft out there, to have more and more embedded boxes in our virtual worlds. We may see that the quality level of each box keeps rising, but I have little doubt that over time, users will demand more “rides” in their “theme parks,” and not just more rollercoasters but more sorts of rides. The rollercoaster-only theme park fails if it doesn’t have at least a few food stands, and while the rollercoaster may always be the main attraction, the whole package includes everything from parades on Main Street to shops to concerts to convention hotels to go-karts.
By that light, calling the “gamey” games “theme parks” points towards the way they will ultimately evolve: towards worldy games.
The challenge is the budgets.
Some minor notes: Brad suspects that I might have the history of instancing at my fingertips. He’s wrong. Muds didn’t go for instancing much. But the original Might & Magic Online, which was intended to be the follow-up for Meridian 59 at 3DO, was reputedly based entirely on it. It never saw the light of day.
Similar Threads
